BACKGROUND Ensuring patients receive post-test discussion when collecting HIV test results is an integral component of the HIV testing process. New South Wales Health Department (NSW Health) policy recommends that all patients be given their HIV results in person. We assessed the number of patients who returned for HIV test results to Royal Prince Alfred Sexual Health Clinic in Sydney, Australi...

This paper presents Recurrent Policy Gradients, a modelfree reinforcement learning (RL) method creating limited-memory stochastic policies for partially observable Markov decision problems (POMDPs) that require long-term memories of past observations. The approach involves approximating a policy gradient for a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) by backpropagating return-weighted characteristic elig...

One of the most important duties of financial economy is modeling and forecasting the volatilities of price of risky assets. From analysts and policy makers’ view, price volatility is a key variable contributing to perception of market volatilities. Therefore, analysts need to have an appropriate of forecast of price volatility as a necessary input to perform duties such as risk management, por...

Likelihood ratio policy gradient methods have been some of the most successful reinforcement learning algorithms, especially for learning on physical systems. We describe how the likelihood ratio policy gradient can be derived from an importance sampling perspective. This derivation highlights how likelihood ratio methods under-use past experience by (i) using the past experience to estimate on...

This paper shows a novel cache architecture, called SCache, to detect and prevent buffer-overflow attacks at run time. A number of malicious codes exploit buffer-overflow vulnerability to alter a return-address value and hijack the program-execution control. In order to solve the security issue, SCache generates replica cache lines on each return-address store, and compares the original value l...

Current theories conceptualize return migration to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an individual-level assessment of costs and benefits. Since relocation is cost prohibitive, return migration is thought to be unlikely for vulnerable populations. However, recent analyses of longitudinal survey data suggest that these individuals are likely to return to New Orleans over time despite achiev...

JEL Bibliographic Code O15, O18, O47, O53 We postulate that inferior factor productivity in China’s noncoastal provinces is a principal reason for their lower economic growth despite high investment rates relative to coastal provinces. Using the residual from a fixed-effect Solow growth model for the years 1978-93, we find that TFP is roughly twice as high in the coastal provinces. We estimate ...

This policy addresses the role of attending physicians in assisting their patients to return to work after an illness or injury. The physician's role is to diagnose and treat the illness or injury, to advise and support the patient, to provide and communicate appropriate information to the patient and the employer and to work closely with other involved health care professionals to facilitate t...

This paper estimates the marginal returns to college for individuals induced to enroll in college by different marginal policy changes. The recent instrumental variables literature seeks to estimate this parameter, but in general it does so only under strong assumptions that are tested and found wanting. We show how to utilize economic theory and local instrumental variables estimators to estim...

In this paper we give explicit error bounds for approximations of the optimal policy function in the stochastic dynamic programming problem. The approximated policy function is obtained by using the Bellman equation with an approximated value function and the error bounds depend on the primitive data of the problem. Neither differentiability of the return function nor interiority of solutions i...